Google’s ranking now takes loading speed into consideration!

Most online publishers already know instinctively that a slow-loading website isn’t a good thing. After all, who has the time to browse around a website on which pages take forever to load? Not a lot of people in today’s fast-paced world.

Google knows that, and after it dropped a hint late last year, has followed through on its plans to incorporate website speed into its ranking algorithm.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

Common sense stuff to be sure, but that said, it’s worth pointing out that it’s probably not advisable to fret over your website’s performance and hosting setup if your website generally performs well. That’s because website speed is still a minor ranking factor:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Nonetheless, in the highly-competitive world of SEO, any opportunity for gain will be of interest to publishers and SEOs.